London Far Right Mayoral Candidate Thinks Immigrants Will Ruin UK — And He’s From Uruguay

Carlos Cortiglia

The fact that the Far Right British Nationalist Party (the BNP) is fielding a candidate from Uruguay in next year’s London mayoral elections has widely been regarded as farce, though of course the BNP don’t spin it like that.

Instead, the BNP argue that the fact they have nominated Carlos Cortiglia, who emigrated from Uruguay to the UK in 1989 and has Spanish and Italian blood, is a good thing.

They are no longer a racist party, they hope to say, with its links to extremist groups like the National Front and its limit on membership to “indigenous Caucasian” people (non-white people were finally allowed to join in 2010). However, as Snipe London points out, Cortiglia, the immigrant, thinks immigrants are going to ruin the UK. He writes on his blog just two months ago:

“Look at the partition of Yugoslavia. What has been the argument about who owns Kosovo? This is bound to happen in Britain, especially because they [immigrants] have been building ghettos that usually have their own language, their own customs and their own values. One day, we might find ourselves having to decide who own Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, Liverpool and parts of London like Towers Hamlets and Barking and Dagenham or even London as a whole.”

So what is Cortiglia saying? Immigrants are bad, except from Uruguay? That the UK is heading to a Kosovo-style civil war? The mind boggles.

From Business Insider . Story by Adam Taylor. 29.11.11

Editorial. If the BNP really had dropped its racist creed, Liverpool Antifascists could not be more delighted. Not only would that represent equal membership opportunities for everyone regardless of race or colour, it would neuter the miniscule shred of nazi barbarism, which is all that is left of the BNP. That is because fascism cannot exist and grow, and it cannot bind the indigenous population to its will, without creating a racial scapegoat.

Needless to say though, this is one issue where Nick Griffin can sleep easy in his bed. Cortiglia, with his Spanish and Italian ancestry, is in the BNP’s eyes an “indigenous Caucasian”, and is therefore automatically segregated from all the “non-Caucasians” which infest their febrile imagination. My God, what a myopic view of humanity the one-eyed Griffin must have.

Liverpool Antifascists

Germany to compensate 'neo-Nazi' murder victims

One alleged member of the neo-Nazi group,
Beate Zschaepe, blew up her flat before handing herself in

Germany has agreed to compensate families of victims of an alleged neo-Nazi cell accused of killing 10 people over a decade.

The parliament, chancellery and presidency also agreed to hold a national memorial service for the dead. The killings have long been known as the "kebab murders" because many of those killed ran snack shops. Detectives have charged a woman and arrested another person in connection with the case.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has called it a national disgrace, and questioned how the group could have slipped under the radar when it was known to the authorities. Among the alleged victims were nine immigrants - eight from Turkey and one from Greece - and a police officer.

Promising compensation, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told reporters: "I fear that at the end of the investigation, we will uncover more victims of xenophobia than we are aware of today. Even if financial help cannot undo the suffering, I will attempt to give the victims' families a sign of our solidarity with compensation from my budget."

The existence of the cell, linked to the National Socialist Underground group, emerged when two alleged members of the group killed themselves. The two men, Uwe Mundlos, 38, and Uwe Boenhardt, 34, were found dead earlier this month in a caravan in Eisenach in eastern Germany. They had left behind a DVD in which they admitted to the 10 killings.

Beate Zschaepe, 36, who had shared a house with the two men, has since been charged with membership of a terrorist organisation. She had handed herself in.

Germany's top prosecutor Harald Range said two other people are suspected of helping the group.

Detectives are reopening all unsolved cases stretching back to 1998 in which possible racist motives could have been involved. The alleged neo-Nazi cell is also suspected of carrying out a bomb attack in Cologne, in which 23 people were wounded, and a number of bank robberies.

The killings have reheated the debate in Germany as to whether to ban the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). A previous attempt was rejected by the country's constitutional court in 2003.

BBC

Thanks to Zaahid for the heads-up

David Miliband warns against complacency over rightwing extremism

Former foreign secretary praises Demos report into rise of far right in Europe

David Miliband has joined those warning about the rise of a new wave of far-right nationalist parties across Europe, saying that it is important to keep track of their ascent.

In a rare foray into international politics since his defeat for the Labour party leadership 14 months ago, the former foreign secretary praised a report by the thinktank Demos which revealed a mass of mainly young, male Facebook-based supporters of such groups, who often held vehemently antagonistic views about immigrants and, in particular, Muslims.

"This report is an important antidote to any complacency about rightwing extremism," Miliband told the Guardian. "It shows that discontent with globalisation can fuel the politics of the right as well as the left. The Occupy protests have captured media attention but away from the public eye the hard right is also organising. The only way to defend the gains of globalisation is to understand its most dangerous critics, and this report helps us to do so."

The rise of such parties, which now hold significant parliamentary blocs in well over half a dozen western European countries, from Italy to the Netherlands to Scandinavia, has a particularly personal element for Miliband, whose Jewish immigrant parents fled Nazi Europe.

The Demos report sampled the views of more than 10,000 people who support such parties and street movements on Facebook pages, which for the 24 groups had a combined total of almost 450,000 mainly young fans. The breadth of such hard-right views means they are in danger of "becoming mainstream", warned Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP of Turkish descent who heads the European parliament's anti-racism forum.

She said: "In some countries, for example the Netherlands, it even becomes the majority because mainstream right or centre-right parties are adopting the rhetoric of nationalist-populist parties in an attempt to attract their voters."

Observer

Far right on rise in Europe, says report

Study by Demos thinktank reveals thousands of self-declared followers of hardline nationalist parties and groups

The far right is on the rise across Europe as a new generation of young, web-based supporters embrace hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to examine the phenomenon.

Research by the British thinktank Demos for the first time examines attitudes among supporters of the far right online. Using advertisements on Facebook group pages, they persuaded more than 10,000 followers of 14 parties and street organisations in 11 countries to fill in detailed questionnaires.

The study reveals a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future is focused on cultural identity, with immigration – particularly a perceived spread of Islamic influence – a concern.

"We're at a crossroads in European history," said Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP who heads the anti-racism lobby at the European parliament. "In five years' time we will either see an increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, or we will be able to fight this horrific tendency."

The report comes just over three months after Anders Breivik, a supporter of hard right groups, shot dead 69 people at youth camp near Oslo. While he was disowned by the parties, police examination of his contacts highlighted the Europe-wide online discussion of anti-immigrant and nationalist ideas.

Data in the study was mainly collected in July and August, before the worsening of the eurozone crisis. The report highlights the prevalence of anti-immigrant feeling, especially suspicion of Muslims. "As antisemitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century," said Thomas Klau from the European Council on Foreign Relations, who will speak at Monday's conference.

Parties touting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideas have spread beyond established strongholds in France, Italy and Austria to the traditionally liberal Netherlands and Scandinavia, and now have significant parliamentary blocs in eight countries. Other nations have seen the rise of nationalist street movements like the English Defence League (EDL). But, experts say, polling booths and demos are only part of the picture: online, a new generation is following these organisations and swapping ideas, particularly through Facebook. For most parties the numbers online are significantly bigger than their formal membership.

The phenomenon is sometimes difficult to pin down given the guises under which such groups operate. At one end are parties like France's National Front, a significant force in the country's politics for 25 years and seen as a realistic challenger in next year's presidential election. At the other are semi-organised street movements like the EDL, which struggles to muster more than a few hundred supporters for occasional demonstrations, or France's Muslim-baiting Bloc Indentitaire, best known for serving a pork-based "identity soup" to homeless people.

Others still take an almost pick-and-mix approach to ideology; a number of the Scandinavian parties which have flourished in recent years combine decidedly left-leaning views on welfare with vehement opposition to all forms of multiculturalism.

Youth, Demos found, was a common factor. Facebook's own advertising tool let Demos crunch data from almost 450,000 supporters of the 14 organisations. Almost two-thirds were aged under 30, against half of Facebook users overall. Threequarters were male, and more likely than average to be unemployed.

The separate anonymous surveys showed a repeated focus on immigration, specifically a perceived threat from Muslim populations. This rose with younger supporters, contrary to most previous surveys which found greater opposition to immigration among older people. An open-ended question about what first drew respondents to the parties saw Islam and immigration listed far more often than economic worries. Answers were sometimes crude – "The foreigners are slowly suffocating our lovely country. They have all these children and raise them so badly," went one from a supporter of the Danish People's Party. Others argued that Islam is simply antithetical to a liberal democracy, a view espoused most vocally by Geert Wilders, the Dutch leader of the Party for Freedom, which only six years after it was founded is the third-biggest force in the country's parliament.

This is a "key point" for the new populist-nationalists, said Matthew Goodwin from Nottingham University, an expert on the far right. "As an appeal to voters, it marks a very significant departure from the old, toxic far-right like the BNP. What some parties are trying to do is frame opposition to immigration in a way that is acceptable to large numbers of people. Voters now are turned off by crude, blatant racism – we know that from a series of surveys and polls.

"[These groups are] saying to voters: it's not racist to oppose these groups if you're doing it from the point of view of defending your domestic traditions. This is the reason why people like Geert Wilders have not only attracted a lot of support but have generated allies in the mainstream political establishment and the media."

While the poll shows economics playing a minimal role, analysts believe the eurozone crisis is likely to boost recruitment to anti-EU populist parties which are keen to play up national divisions. "Why do the Austrians, as well as the Germans or the Dutch, constantly have to pay for the bottomless pit of the southern European countries?" asked Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Freedom Party of Austria, once led by the late Jörg Haider. Such parties have well over doubled their MPs around western Europe in a decade. "What we have seen over the past five years is the emergence of parties in countries which were traditionally seen as immune to the trend – the Sweden Democrats, the True Finns, the resurgence of support for the radical right in the Netherlands, and our own experience with the EDL," said Goodwin.

The phenomenon was now far beyond a mere protest vote, he said, with many supporters expressing worries about national identity thus far largely ignored by mainstream parties.

Gavan Titley, an expert on the politics of racism in Europe and co-author of the recent book The Crises of Multiculturalism, said these mainstream politicians had another responsibility for the rise of the new groups, by too readily adopting casual Islamophobia.

"The language and attitudes of many mainstream parties across Europe during the 'war on terror', especially in its early years, laid the groundwork for much of the language and justifications that these groups are now using around the whole idea of defending liberal values – from gender to freedom of speech," he said.

"Racist strategies constantly adapt to political conditions, and seek new sets of values, language and arguments to make claims to political legitimacy. Over the past decade, Muslim populations around Europe, whatever their backgrounds, have been represented as the enemy within or at least as legitimately under suspicion. It is this very mainstream political repertoire that newer movements have appropriated."

Jamie Bartlett of Demos, the principal author of the report, said it was vital to track the spread of such attitudes among the new generation of online activists far more numerous than formal membership of such parties. "There are hundreds of thousands of them across Europe. They are disillusioned with mainstream politics and European political institutions and worried about the erosion of their cultural and national identity, and are turning to populist movements, who they feel speak to these concerns.

"These activists are largely out of sight of mainstream politicians, but they are motivated, active, and growing in size. Politicians across the continent need to sit up, listen and respond."
Voting trends

As a political party, having tens of thousands of online supporters is one thing but translating these into actual votes can be quite another. However, the Demos survey found that 67% of the Facebook fans of the nationalist-populist groups which put up candidates – some are street movements only – said they had voted for them at the most recent election.

Further analysis found that female supporters were more likely to turn support into a vote, as were those who were employed.

Observer

Anti-immigrant and Europhobic – far right parties ride populist wave

Members of Jobbik, a far-right Hungarian party which has
been using Auschwitz slogans in its attempt to pick up votes.

In Europe's biggest port, where nearly half the population of 600,000 is of immigrant origin, Geert Wilders appears to be knocking on an open door.

The platinum-blond, Islam-baiting populist is soaring in opinion surveys in the Netherlands, hammering the anti-immigration message to double his ratings this year to the point where his Freedom party is challenging to be the strongest in the country, according to a leading weekly tracking poll.

Wilders' acolytes are also poised to enter the European parliament for the first time after elections for the EU's sole democratically elected institution, covering 375 million people across 27 countries, take place next week.

"He's a clown, crazy," said Aarjen Heida, a Rotterdam banker, of the ­iconoclast banned from Britain for "hate speech" and facing trial in the Netherlands. "But he's dangerous. A lot of people will vote for him. People are unhappy with the way things are going here and often that has to do with foreigners."

Hans Oole, a retired Rotterdam food engineer, insisted he would not vote for Wilders next week. "I don't like the way he says things. But sometimes he's right. Most Dutch people are really afraid of Islam and it is coming all over."

According to city statistics, ethnic Dutch residents will be a minority in Rotterdam within a few years. At present just over one third of children under 14 are ethnically Dutch. Wilders, who likens Islam to fascism and the Qur'an to Mein Kampf, exploits such figures to argue that the Netherlands is being swamped by immigration. He also hates the EU, pledging to try to abolish the European parliament when his party ­colleagues take their seats in July. He hopes to win five of the 25 Dutch seats.

Wilders' success represents, in part, a souring of traditional Dutch enthusiasm for the EU. It also appears symptomatic of a broader insurrectionary mood across Europe that is expected to favour extremists, mavericks and populists in the voting taking place over four days from next Thursday. Overt racism and the calculated use of Nazi language are featuring in what is otherwise a lacklustre campaign.

In Austria, the hard-right Freedom party of Heinz-Christian Strache, tipped to take up to 20% of the vote, is pandering openly to antisemitism. "A veto of Turkey and Israel joining the EU," declare the party posters despite the fact that Israel, unlike Turkey, is not negotiating to join.

Last week in the Czech Republic, state television broadcast a campaign slot from the small, fascist National party calling the large Roma community "parasites" and echoing Nazi formulation of the Holocaust policy from 1942 by demanding "a final solution of the Gypsy question".

The party is not expected to get into the European parliament, but in ­Hungary the far-right Jobbik, which boasts black-shirted paramilitaries and maintains relations with the British National party, has been using Auschwitz slogans and running a lurid anti-Gypsy campaign. It, like the BNP, could make an electoral breakthrough and win a seat in the parliament which is sited alternately and at great cost in Strasbourg and Brussels.

If the far right is making inroads, the hard left, too, may benefit from the disenchantment with mainstream parties, notably in two of the core EU countries, Germany and France.

The new anti-capitalist party of a postman Trotskyist, Olivier Besancenot, is predicted to win around 10% of the vote in France, while the New Left in Germany – former East German communists allied with West German social democratic defectors – could do likewise. Both parties' gains will hurt the mainstream social democrats.

The chances of the Europhobic extremists entering the parliament are strengthened by the wretched turnout expected next week.

"The low turnout means that those who do vote have very strong opinions. That will bring in more extremist politicians," said Sara Hagemann, a Danish analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels. "You'll see a lot of protest voters in Europe and a lot of apathy towards political elites."

The lack of interest in the election, or protesting by abstaining, could spell a crisis of legitimacy for the parliament and of credibility for the EU more broadly. It is virtually certain that voters will stay away in record numbers, making participation the lowest since voting for the parliament started 30 years ago.

A Eurobarometer poll predicts a turnout of 34%, more than 10 points down on 2004, but that may prove to be optimistic since the pollsters have consistently overestimated participation rates. A poll-tracking study being run by the London School of Economics and ­Trinity College Dublin predicts a turnout of around 30%, meaning that more than two out of three voters across the EU will boycott the ballot.

"The risk of abstention is that it allows Eurosceptics and extremists to take over our debate and our future," José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, warned recently.

Mobilising voters is made more difficult by the fact that the election does not decide a government, nor are the 736 MEPs elected able to initiate European laws, reinforcing the popular notion that the parliament is a remote, irrelevant talking shop.

In fact, voter turnout is in inverse proportion to the parliament's growing powers. Turnout has fallen in each of the seven elections since 1979, while every treaty reshaping the way the EU is run has increased the parliament's clout. It now has a say in shaping around 75% of European law.

From next year, if the Lisbon treaty is implemented following a second referendum in Ireland in October, it will be empowered to "co-decide" almost all European laws, making the parliament one of the big winners of the Lisbon streamlining reforms.

In what already looks like a doomed attempt to combat indifference and drum up interest in the ballot, the parliament itself – as opposed to the competing parties – has hired a German PR firm and spent some €18m (£15.6m) of European taxpayers' money trying to sell the election.

"Come on! It's just a few minutes, maybe you can combine [voting] with a walk in the park or a drink in a cafe. Not much effort to tell Europe what you want," pleads the parliament propaganda. It is falling on closed ears. The lavish spending only compounds the ­parliament's problems, reinforcing the conviction that MEPs are either wasting taxpayers' money or pocketing it.

With around 9,000 candidates running for the 736 seats and with each national ballot turning on the idiosyncrasies of 27 vastly different countries, variations in voting behaviour will be marked. In Germany, for example, the poll will be analysed closely for what it portends for the general election in September, Europe's most important political contest this year. In France, it is likely to be seen as a referendum on two years of President Nicolas Sarkozy, while in Italy, the election will be scrutinised to see if Silvio Berlusconi's marital breakdown is damaging his popularity.

Despite the national variations, trans-national trends are discernible as voters look like venting their anger on incumbents because of the economic crisis, and growing unemployment.

The French, Italian, and Polish governments may be the big exceptions to this trend. But Euroscepticism, previously a British and, to a lesser extent, a Scandinavian characteristic, is spreading even into the historical heartland of the EU, such as the Netherlands.

"The Dutch have become very cantankerous. It's very sad," said a senior EU official. "They've gone from being the most pro-European country to one of the most anti-European."

While Wilders pledges to destroy the EU "from within", the hard-left Socialist party's pitch is for "more Netherlands, less Brussels". And among the centrist parties in government in the Netherlands, there is little positive being said about Brussels or the EU. "Even among the non-extreme parties, scepticism has crept in," said Hagemann.

Leading this new movement of Eurosceptics and seeking to establish it as a more powerful transnational political force in Europe are David Cameron's Conservatives, who are pledged to end two decades of alliance with the mainstream European centre-right (the European People's party) and form a new caucus of European Conservatives.

The entry of several dozen extremists and populists will make the parliament a more raucous, bad-tempered place, but will not substantively affect the balance of power between Christian Democrats, social democrats and liberals.

But Cameron's move should have more impact. He has been helped by the entry of central European countries in 2004. He will depend on rightwingers from Poland and the Czech Republic and a few other countries to set up the new grouping, which will signify the biggest change in the new five-year parliament.

The LSE-Trinity College study predicts more than 60 seats from up to nine countries for the new Conservative caucus, making it the fourth biggest in the parliament. It will be loud in its condemnation of the Lisbon treaty and will campaign for the "repatriation" of powers from Brussels to national capitals.

"We will be very united in limiting European power," said Konrad Szymanski, a Polish MEP from the rightwing Law and Justice party which will supply the second biggest bloc of MEPs after the British.

The election will usher in a busy few months at the top of European politics – Barroso's expected renomination as head of a new commission a fortnight later at a European summit; a German election; an Irish referendum; and probably a contest for the two plum posts of first European president and foreign minister.

But the low turnout and predicted gains for anti-Europeans will get this burst of high-powered politicking off to a bad start.

Guardian

German Boys Join Anti-Immigrant, Neo-Nazi Groups, Study Shows

A study funded by Germany’s Interior Ministry showed that more than twice as many German boys belong to anti-immigrant or neo-Nazi groups than claim membership of the major political parties’ youth organizations.

Out of more than 26,000 youths surveyed in 2007 and 2008, 4.9 percent of boys said they belonged to a “right-wing group or ‘Kamaradschaft’,” the study by Hanover-based research institute KFN showed. That compares with as many as 2 percent that belong to youth organizations for established parties.

“It’s shocking that these right-wing groups can be more successful at mobilizing our youth than the established parties,” KFN Director Christian Pfeiffer told reporters today in Berlin. While a comparison between such groups is inexact, since many established party youth clubs charge membership fees, Pfeiffer said it was instructive.

Last month, about 6,000 German skinhead and neo-Nazi groups in the eastern city of Dresden staged one of their biggest demonstrations since German reunification in 1990. The groups, mostly made up of youths tied to the anti-immigrant National Democratic Party, used the 64th anniversary of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden on Feb. 14 to hold a “mourning march.”

Speaking alongside German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble at a press conference, Pfeiffer said he didn’t know whether the 4.9 percent figure had increased, since a comparable number wasn’t available from previous studies. Some 2.6 percent of girls said they belonged to anti-immigrant and neo-Nazi organizations.

Kamaradschaften are clubs that offer a forum for symbols and songs that often recall Germany’s Nazi past. The display of Nazi symbols is prohibited in Germany.

The study also revealed that 29.7 percent of youths agreed with the statement that there are “too many foreigners in Germany;” another 34.8 percent tended toward that position, according to the study, Youth in Germany as Victims and Perpetrators of Violence.

Bloomberg

Putin's worst nightmare

Right-wing demonstrators give the Nazi salute during a rally
against immigration Day, in Moscow. December 12, 2008.

Their mission is to cleanse Russia of its ethnic "occupiers", with an anti-immigrant stance supported by half the population. And since 2004 their most extreme members have murdered more than 350 people.

It was 9.10pm and Karen Abramian was returning home to his flat in southwest Moscow. Abramian had been visiting his parents in a nearby tower block. His journey back took five minutes - past a series of grey high-rise buildings soaring into Moscow's packed skyline and a children's playground, and up a modest flight of steps. As he punched in the entrance code, two young men, one wearing a baseball cap and one a bandana, approached him from behind. And then they stabbed him. They stabbed him again - methodically slashing his head, neck, back and stomach. Abramian pleaded with his attackers. "Don't do this. Please take my money," he begged them. His assailants - two slight, boyish, almost nerdish figures - ignored him, stabbing him 56 times. At this moment, Abramian's wife Marta peered out of their ninth-floor apartment window and spotted two boys beating a dark shape lying on the ground. The couple's 14-year-old son Georgy, who had been playing nearby, found his father in the entrance, bleeding profusely. Georgy took off his T-shirt (it was April, still winter in Russia, and bitterly cold), wrapped it around his father and ran upstairs. Abramian was conscious when Georgy came back with a blanket and pillow. Georgy wrapped his father in it and they waited in the gloom for an ambulance. Abramian told his son simply: "They were skinheads." Four hours later, in the early hours of 17 April 2007, Abramian was dead. Doctors had been unable to stem the colossal loss of blood.

The names of Abramian's killers are Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, both 17. Their motive for murdering Abramian, the 46-year-old boss of a Moscow insurance company, was ideological. As they saw it, Abramian's violent death was part of a national liberation movement - an ambitious, quasi-mystical struggle to get rid of Russia's foreigners, in which they played the role of hero-warriors. The boys had picked Abramian because he was an ethnic Armenian. But his murder was an act of random racist violence: Ryno and Skachevsky spotted him on the street and decided impulsively to kill him. They were apprehended by a neighbour who witnessed the attack and ran after them. They insouciantly escaped on the number 26 tram, but the neighbour, a former investigator, flagged down a passing police Lada and gave chase. Police officers halted the tram and arrested both boys. Ryno and Skachevsky had turned their blood-soaked overcoats inside out; their victim, however, had managed to grab one of them by the arm, leaving behind a bloody print. They made no attempt to disguise their crime; on the contrary, they were proud of it. In their rucksack, detectives discovered 10in knives. In custody, investigators asked Ryno and Skachevsky whether they had committed other murders. To their surprise, the teenagers said they had. In a period of nine months, from August 2006 to April 2007, when they stabbed Abramian, they had killed 20 people and attacked at least 12 others, who had survived. Initially, the police were highly sceptical, assuming that the boys were delusional. Gradually, however, investigators began to confirm Ryno and Skachevsky's fantastic claims. Prosecutors established that the diminutive pair had indeed killed 20 people.

Ryno and Skachevsky are among the worst mass murderers in Russia's modern history. Three hours before Abramian's murder the pair stabbed to death Kyril Sadikov, a Tajik. They ate some food, then set off in search of their next victim. The 45-page court indictment against them shows a disturbing pattern, with the skinheads lying in wait next to different suburban metro stations and stabbing their victims 15 to 60 times. The victims had one thing in common: they weren't Slavs. Most were guest workers toiling in Moscow's building industry or as cleaners in the capital's communal courtyards and urban parks. Nobody knows how many low-wage gastarbeiter are currently resident in Moscow, a teeming metropolis of 12 million people - estimates range from 200,000 to 2 million. Typically, Ryno and Skachevsky's targets had fled poverty and the impoverished former Soviet republics of Central Asia - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Others were from China. A few were "of Caucasian appearance", as the charge sheet puts it, from Russia's troubled southern provinces of Chechnya or Dagestan.

Like all warriors involved in a holy war, as they perceived it, the boys sometimes made mistakes: several of their dark-skinned victims were actually ethnic Russians. One murder sticks out. On 9 April 2007, it was the turn of S Azimov, an Uzbek student. The skinheads ambushed Azimov outside his flat in Moscow's northwest suburb of Voikovskaya. Azimov lived on Zoe and Alexander Kosmodimiyansky Street - named after two Soviet partisans. Moscow's British school is a short walk away, down a busy boulevard; middle-class parents in orange Range Rovers whizz past. Voikovskaya is a blandly anonymous suburb, the kind of place where nothing really happens. The skinheads stabbed Azimov 56 times. As he lay on the ground, his life ebbing away, they cut off his left ear.

Alexander Verkhovsky describes Ryno and Skachevsky's killing spree as "very unusual". Verkhovsky is an eloquent, English-speaking Russian with shoulder-length black hair and a 70s-style suede jacket. He is an expert on xenophobic violence and the director of Sova, a Moscow information centre that logs hate crime. We meet in a Moscow café a few days before Ryno and Skachevsky's five-month trial for murder is due to end. Just round the corner, around 300 neo-Nazi activists are holding a rally beneath a statue of the Russian playwright Alexandr Griboyedov. (Griboyedov is a sort of early skinhead martyr. The author of the verse comedy Woe from Wit, he was stabbed to death in 1829 by a Persian mob.) The skinheads wave black, yellow and white flags; a few clamber on the statue and launch Hitler salutes, shouting: "Russia for Russians".

I later discover that most Russian skinheads revere the Führer, believing that his only mistake was to attack Russia. The average age here is about 15 or 16; the style is baseball caps, Burberry scarves and Lonsdale - the uniform of the British far-right. One skinhead even has a Union Flag jacket. There are several girls. The skinheads adhere to two ultra-nationalist groups - the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and the Slavic Union. A stall shows a photo of 15-year-old Anna Beshnova - a pretty, blonde Russian schoolgirl raped and then murdered in October 2008 by an Uzbek city maintenance worker.

Her death has ignited racial tensions across the city's already flammable lower-middle-class suburbs and inspired several revenge attacks.

According to Verkhovsky, the phenomenon of racist violence in Russia isn't new. What makes Ryno and Skachevsky's case remarkable, he says, is the prolific scale of their murder spree. The fact that the police solved their crimes has nothing to do with their investigative skills, he says, but is down to the teenagers confessing: "This isn't an example of good investigation."

Xenophobic prejudice is widespread in Russia, Verkhovsky says. "More than 50% support the idea that ethnic Russians should have privileges over other ethnic groups," he says. "More than 50% believe that ethnic minorities should be limited or even expelled from their region." Under communism there was prejudice towards non-Slavs as well as Jews, despite the poly-ethnic nature of Soviet life. In the 1990s, when many ethnic Russians returned from newly independent republics like Uzbekistan, prejudice continued. But it is over the past eight years that racism has grown to astonishing levels, Verkhovsky says. Russia's second war in Chechnya and the 1999 apartment block bombings, which killed almost 300 people in four Russian cities, created this new xenophobia. The Kremlin blamed the bombings on terrorist Chechens; others suspect they were the work of the FSB, the former KGB. Either way, racism in Russia is now ubiquitous. According to Sova, 96 people were murdered in 2008 in racist or neo-Nazi attacks, with another 419 beaten or wounded. (The number of deaths was 50 in 2004, 47 in 2005, 64 in 2006 and 86 in 2007.) Last month, another 12 people were murdered. Sova's research suggests that xenophobic prejudice has become mainstream, acceptable. And while most Russians don't support radical ideas in practice, there are around 2,000-3,000 young skinheads prepared to attack and kill migrants, he estimates. Russia's law enforcement agencies, tasked with the job of catching these boy killers, share the prejudices of Russia's general population. Typically, police officers ignore race attacks, or classify them with the lesser charge of hooliganism. Verkhovsky says: "Enforcement is very weak. These young skinheads don't feel fear of the police, since the risk of getting caught is small."

The bloody evidence appears to confirm his grim thesis. A few days before our meeting, an unknown group, the Militant Organisation of Russian Nationalists, sends out a chilling email. The group says it has murdered a 20-year-old Tajik, stabbing him six times as he walked home from his job at a food warehouse. They cut off his head, dumping it in a bin outside a council office in western Moscow. The victim's body was discovered near the village of Zhabkino, a few kilometres outside the capital. The email includes an attachment. It is a photograph of the young man's head lying on a giant wooden chopping block. The group says the murder is a protest against authority for its failure to deal with immigration or - as the killers put it - to rid Russia of its Caucasian and Central Asian "occupiers". Unless government officials deport "the blacks" their heads would "fly off" next, it warns. The beheading is reminiscent of another gruesome neo-Nazi attack that surfaced last year on the internet via far-right websites. The video - entitled "The execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani" - shows two men kneeling in an autumnal Russian forest, bound and gagged under a Nazi flag. Masked men saw the head off one man and shoot the other. Russian investigators initially dismissed the video as a hoax. Later, however, it emerged it was genuine. A man recognised the Dagestani victim as his missing brother; he had vanished in Moscow several months earlier. During the same week in December 2008, unknown assailants in the southern city of Volgograd casually knifed a black American teenager. Stanley Robinson, 18, from Providence, Rhode Island, had been in Russia on a school exchange. The attack left him critically injured and he was flown out of Russia to Finland for emergency surgery. Back in south Moscow, suspected skinheads stabbed an 18-year-old Kazakh student, Yerlan Aitymov, as he waited for a bus near Kaluzhskaya metro station. Yerlan died on the way to hospital.

Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky do not fit the profile of classicserial killers. There isn't much in their upbringing to suggest they will turn into flamboyant teenage murderers. Ryno grew up in the southern Urals city of Yekaterinburg. His parents divorced when he was young; his father is from Russia's Far Eastern province of Chukotka. (Ironically, Ryno's own features are slightly non-Slavic.) At school Ryno showed an aptitude for drawing; classmates describe him as a quiet, introverted pupil who struggled to make friends. His lawyers claim he fell under the sway of racist ideas after a Chechen schoolmate beat him up. In 2006 Ryno moved to Moscow, where he enrolled in Moscow's arts institute and studied icon painting. (Several of Ryno's icons hang in the church in Yekaterinburg, built on the spot where the Bolsheviks shot Russia's last tsar and his family.) In Moscow, Ryno shaved off his hair. He met Skachevsky via an ultra-nationalist website, www.format18.ru (the numbers 18, of course, correspond to Adolf Hitler's alphabetic initials). The forum is popular with teenage skinheads who use it to swap videos of their racist attacks.

Skachevsky grew up in Moscow. The son of a deputy headmistress, he was a gifted student. Like Ryno, Skachevsky hates "blacks" - claiming that several of his friends perished in the 1999 Moscow apartment block bombings. "I live in the house opposite Guryanova Street, and the block which the Chechens blew up," he told friends. At the time of the murders Skachevsky was a student at Moscow's college for physical education. Together, the pair formed a gang of around a dozen like-minded skinheaded killers. They are a geeky-looking bunch - the tallest is a girl, Svetlana Avvakumova, 22, who videoed one of the gang's brutal attacks on a Chinese youth. Several wear glasses. Police got round to arresting Avvakumova in February 2008.

The trial of the Ryno/Skachevsky gang began last July at Moscow's city court. Outside court, I meet Avvakumova's mother, Yelena, who has turned up hoping to catch a glimpse of her imprisoned daughter. Yelena is baffled at her daughter's involvement, denying that Svetlana has anything to do with skinheads. After her arrest, however, detectives showed her the video, which faithfully records how the gang mercilessly kick and knife a Chinese boy as he lies on the ground. The boy is crying. Avvakumova downloaded the film on her home computer alongside snaps taken on the monastery-lake island of Valaam during a holiday in Russia's picturesque north.

"Svetlana was always an innocent," Yelena says. "As a girl she was a bit of a tomboy. She liked football and used to watch Spartak Moscow FC." Intriguingly, Yelena has a strong sense of where her daughter has gone wrong. Skinheads are something of a paradox in Russia, a country that sacrificed 25 million people in the fight against Nazi Germany and the ideas of racial supremacy. "My father was a tank commander during the war. He was severely injured during the battle for Königsberg; it left him disabled. He personally fought fascism. Svetlana understands perfectly what fascism is. We still have her grandfather's medals." According to Yelena, attitudes changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "My generation was a Soviet one. We were internationalist. We have Armenian relatives. My brother even married a Japanese woman. The problem is with this new generation. They don't understand the difference between nationalism and patriotism. They confuse the two."

Dmitry Dyomushkin is wearing a Ben Sherman T-shirt; he's ordered a plate of kebab and a bowl of borsch - beetroot soup. He speaks Russian with a slight impediment, and lights a cigarette after every mouthful. Dyomushkin is the leader of the Slavic Union, Russia's most radical ultra-nationalist organisation. Aged 30, he is a veteran of Russia's far-right scene. We meet in a pub in Marino, a sprawling dormitory suburb in southern Moscow, full of tower blocks and at the end of Moscow's light-green Metro line.

Both Ryno and Skachevsky were members of the Slavic Union. (In Russian the organisation is called the Slaviyansky Sayuz, the SS.) "I didn't know them personally," Dyomushkin says. "They were young guys sitting in the corner of the meetings. They were quiet, mouse-like." His organisation has 1,500 members across Russia, though experts suggest the number of far-right activists is around 50,000. The SS fights against illegal immigration and for the rights of Russians in Russia. Dyomushkin says he has been disappointed by the radical actions of many of his members - more than 100 of them have been arrested and several are now serving life sentences for murder. (One of the group's leaders, Nikola Korolev, was jailed for blowing up Cherkizovsky market in Moscow in August 2006, killing 14 people and wounding 49 with a bomb left outside a Vietnamese café.) "These tactics were wrong," Dyomushkin asserts.

Dyomushkin is at his most plausible when he talks about the threat the Slavic Union now poses to Vladimir Putin. Over the past eight years Putin has squeezed out virtually all independent political activity in Russia. There are now only two opposition movements left, Dyomushkin argues - the far-right and the democratic liberals. Dyomushkin is scornful of the liberals - "many of whom are Jews" - but agrees they share anti-Kremlin ideas. But while the democrats are weak, divided and marginalised, the nationalists enjoy much broader support - including that of elements deep inside Russia's powerful bureaucracy and law enforcement agencies. (Both Ryno and Skachevsky had links with a former far-right deputy in Russia's Duma, or parliament. Officially they were working as his parliamentary researchers.) Dyomushkin describes Putin's Russia as a "police state", which has retained the worst aspects of the Soviet Union while getting rid of the good bits. "It may seem a paradox, but our movement is now fighting for freedom. It is the nationalists who are fighting for freedom of speech and assembly. Nothing else has the strength to do this. Everyone else is frightened," he says.

In November 2008, police and federal security agents broke up the Slavic Union's annual "Russian March", arresting 1,000 people, including Dyomushkin. He was released after several hours in custody, however, and eventually fined a paltry 1,000 roubles (£23). Russia's authorities are clearly rattled by the rise of the far-right, whose political appeal is likely to grow as the country slithers into economic crisis. As living standards tumble it is immigrants who will get the blame. There is no prospect of a pro-western Orange Revolution in Russia. But the possibility of a far-right revolt against Putin is real and growing. The skinheads - a pimply, adolescent army of lower-middle-class racists - pose a serious threat to the Kremlin's otherwise
vice-like grip on power.

In December 2008, Ryno and Skachevsky were sentenced to 10 years in jail, the maximum sentence for a juvenile. Five other members of their gang were jailed for between six and 20 years. The jury acquitted Avvakumova and one other male gang member. During the trial the skinheads showed no remorse, giggling frequently and even laughing at the families of their victims. Ryno made a final speech to the jury. In a rambling address, he explained that he committed the murders for the "tsar, country, and monarchy". Later he revealed that after prison he intends to embark on a new career. He wants to be a politician.

Marta Abramian shows off a photo of her husband, taken a month before his murder. As well as their son Georgy, the couple have two strikingly pretty dark-haired daughters, Meline and Karine, now 20 and 21. The photos show Karen dancing with his girls at a party; other snaps show the family relaxing on holiday in Egypt, next to a camel; there are black and white photos of Karen's happy boyhood in Baku, Azerbaijan. The couple met and courted in Baku, but in the late 80s they moved to Moscow when war erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Karen studied at Moscow University and then joined an insurance firm, rising to become its general director. He wrote poems and composed songs. "He was a wonderful father, a wonderful son and wonderful husband," Marta says. "I never thought this could happen to my husband. We considered ourselves real citizens of Russia. We work here. We pay taxes. This is our country."

We meet in the apartment of Karen's parents, Asya, 75, and Georgy, 76. They sit together on the sofa holding their son's framed photo; his murder outrages them still. After an hour punctuated by phone calls from the court - the skinheads' trial is just ending - Marta takes us to the spot where Karen was murdered. Next to the entrance, she has planted a small fir tree; she and the kids still live upstairs on the ninth floor. "It's so we can remember Daddy," she says. "It's very difficult without him. There is just an empty shape. Nothing can fill the emptiness.".

Observer

France's Front National faces ruin as Sarkozy steals Le Pen's clothes

France's xenophobic, anti-immigrant National Front party is facing financial ruin, with its vote set to crash in parliamentary elections tomorrow.

The far-right party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen looks like being swept aside by "la vague bleue" - the blue wave of support for the conservative UMP party of newly elected president Nicolas Sarkozy.

While the UMP is tipped to win up to 430 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, giving Mr Sarkozy a free reign to implement his "economic revolution", the National Front's performance is expected to be so poor it may lose its vote-dependent state subsidy of £3.1 million. The party now faces the prospect of selling its Paris headquarters.

In last month's presidential elections, Mr Le Pen lost nearly a million votes in comparison with 2002, scoring 10 per cent of the ballot in his worst result since 1974. This downward trend is expected to be confirmed in this month's parliamentary vote and in elections for municipal and regional councils, where the National Front is only expected to win between 3 and 8 per cent of the vote.

Even in its stronghold of Provence in southern France - where the National Front has won between 20 and 25 per cent of the vote and once controlled four city councils - the party is expected to see its vote cut in half.

The meltdown can be explained in a name: Nicolas Sarkozy.

The UMP leader has appropriated Mr Le Pen's rhetoric on immigration and law and order, creating a new ministry of immigration and national identity and stealing 38 per cent of the far-right winger's 2002 voters in last month's presidential polls. Mr Sarkozy enjoys 88 per cent popularity among National Front supporters, polls show.

Despite turning 79 later this month, Mr Le Pen refuses to relinquish his position as party leader.

The bickering Socialists are set to face further humiliation after the defeat of presidential candidate Ségolène Royal with their number of seats possibly falling as low as 115. Centrist Francois Bayrou is forecast to win only a handful of seats for his new Democratic Movement party after most of his MPs defected to Mr Sarkozy. The French Communist Party is also in danger of losing nine of its current 21 deputies after a disastrous result of less than 2 per cent in the presidentials.

The Scotsman

The 'ever-widening hellhole, from the sound of Bow Bells eastwards, all the way to Essex'

Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking, having migrated from Islington to this east London constituency, has for some time now trained her fire on immigrants. Barking is a Labour stronghold, even though the racist British National Party won some seats there in last year's council elections.

I am unable to offer any answer to the question as to why Hodge made an anti-immigrant outburst in a recent article of hers for the Observer, entitled "A message to my fellow immigrants". She attempts to place us on the defensive in her first paragraph. "In our open, tolerant country," she writes, "there are, thankfully, few issues that remain taboo. But, motivated by the fear of both legitimising racism and encouraging the extreme right, migration is one."

This is absolute nonsense. Not a week passes in which immigration is not central to the news and current affairs agenda. Statistics and opinions abound. Predictions of numbers that will arrive in the UK are plastered across the pages of the press, adorned by commentators who, in large measure, tempt white people to vent their collective spleen against immigrants.

Hodge is the latest in a long line to encourage this tendency. With one sweep of the pen, she suggests that only white families in her constituency, and others nearby, "have lived in the area for three generations". She is wrong. Over three generations, black people have settled in the East End of London, in Tiger Bay in Cardiff, and in Bristol and Liverpool, too. As long as we have been here we have been the target of white racism, pointing fingers of blame at us for the misfortunes to which others are prey.

Thousands of seafaring men signed off at these English ports to settle and raise three generations. Ramadhan Hassan was one of them. He arrived from Zanzibar, married into one of the largest clans in Canning Town - the Watsons - and begat one Leila Ramadhan Hassan, who happens to be my wife.

Racism, as we know, is a disease that has deformed political thinking and social behaviour in the East End and beyond. Leila's mother talked until the last hours of her life about how badly she had been treated at Whitechapel Hospital, where she gave birth to her beautiful, bouncing baby girl. She was treated like the shit that was smeared on the blanket given to her when she and Leila were discharged.

She talked bitterly about the abuse thrown at her and her newborn daughter on public transport, in shops and along the East End streets. It was not the idea that we were taking "their" housing, Margaret, but "their" women. "They came to defile our women," is the cry that Margaret invites us to repeat. Racial assaults added to the misery heaped on black men, their women and their offspring. "Half-caste" was a term of racial abuse first coined in the East End of London.

Then Enoch Powell issued the clarion call for the repatriation of all immigrants. Workers at the East End docks where every male member of the Watson clan was employed took to the streets under the slogan "Send them back".

And there is more, much more, Margaret. The term "Paki-bashing" - describing the favourite sport of white, male workers - was invented in your constituency and its surrounds. The game was played after pub closing time, with the heads of Asians used as footballs. Next door to Barking, where the Ford production plant flowered, white workers managed to rename part of the plant "South Africa" because they kept the blacks and Asians confined to the assembly line.

That racist stench of decay that plagued so many white workers drove Mrs Howe and others to leave the East End for ever. We go back for funerals and family celebrations, though aware at all times that we are entering and leaving an ever-widening hellhole, from the sound of Bow Bells eastwards, all the way to Essex.

The housing issue has returned with a bang as whites move further east as a sign of upward mobility, and Asians follow in the same direction. Stories abound of whites getting together to prevent their kith and kin from selling to Asians.

Margaret Hodge avoids these proven examples, opting instead for the fables spread by the BNP. She is supping from a poisoned chalice.

New Statesman

We need more houses, not divisive housing policies

Margaret Hodge's comments that 'residents' should get priority will only legitimise anti-immigrant sentiment

Margaret Hodge, minister of state for industry and the regions and MP for the east London constituency of Barking, has suggested that long-standing British residents should be given priority over immigrants in relation to housing. Her comments smack of a desperate desire to stop Labour voters from supporting the far-right British National Party (BNP). What they reveal is how out-of-touch ministers are with the people they govern and how sensitive an issue housing has become.

In the Observer last Sunday, Hodge wrote: 'We prioritise the needs of an individual migrant family over the entitlement others feel they have. So a recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded, privately rented flat with the children suffering from asthma will usually get priority over a family with less housing need who have lived in the area for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents. We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.' (1)

If the indigenous family in question is stuck at home, it's got little to do with immigrants. The real problem is that too few new houses are being built. In 2006, just 167,000 new homes were completed in Britain (2). That's up, the government tells us, on the 2000 figure - but that figure was the lowest since the Second World War. Two weeks ago, I joined protesters outside Gordon Brown's Brighton speech who were angry at rocketing house prices that make it near-impossible for most people to get on the property ladder (3).

Just to replace the UK's existing housing stock, Britain needs to build 266,000 new homes every year - something we've consistently failed to do. John Stewart, economist to the House Builder's Federation, has worked out that the consequence of this snail-like replacement rate is that homes being built today will have to stand for 1200 years!

And then there are the homes we need to build, over and above that, for the new households in Britain. By the government's reckoning that is around 200,000 extra houses each year (4). A lot of that new demand is because of changing lifestyles. Since the 1970 Equal Pay Act, women have been joining the workforce in greater numbers, and bringing home wages. Those wages are the basis of mortgage applications. Conservatives bemoan the loss of the nuclear family, and maybe they have a point, but no one wants to see a return to the days when women had no economic independence. The net effect is that there are more, if generally smaller, households than there were, and we need more dwellings to house them.

Lastly, there is immigration. Recent numbers have been quite high with 160,000 more people entering the country than leaving it each year. This is the background to Hodge's outburst. But it is a big mistake to blame these migrant workers for the housing shortage. They are in many cases the people making the houses. One construction boss says that 70-80 per cent of his workers are not English speakers (5).

The problem is not immigration, it is the low number of new homes being built. While the government says the number we need to build is 200,000 a year across the UK, Britain has fallen short of that figure in seven of the years since New Labour was elected in 1997. And the target is way too low in any event because they have forgotten that homes need to be replaced.

Instead of doing something about the problem, Margaret Hodge says that residents should get houses before immigrants, whether or not they need it more. But playing people off against each other on the basis of where they are from can only make racial divisions worse.

How did a liberal-minded person like Margaret Hodge end up shouting for a racist housing policy? Most likely, she is not personally racist. She has a reputation for being very left-wing (the red flag flew over Islington Town Hall when she was council leader in the 1980s). But she is part of a government that has failed to build the houses people need.

At the last election, Hodge panicked at the canvassing returns that told her that the BNP were doing well in her constituency. Like a lot of her cabinet colleagues, Hodge has little feel for how ordinary people think, and was surprised that they are so angry with the government. Nor does she seem aware that the BNP's support is not very committed, but is just seizing on an issue to express their disaffection. Instead of fighting to win the argument that immigrants are not the problem, Hodge is determined to try and outmanoeuvre the BNP on the right, in New Labour-style 'triangulation'. Such a strategy can only end up making those prejudices seem more sound than they really are by giving them ministerial approval.

It is gruesome to see culturally-liberal New Labour politicians repeating the same Old Labour housing policies that ended up with Tower Hamlets' housing stock being racially segregated under the late Peter Shore's 'friends and neighbours' housing policy in the 1970s. But that is the outcome when you have a government that is too frightened of the Campaign to Protect Rural England to build new homes, and too frightened of the voters to argue with them.

James Heartfield is author of Let's Build: Why We Need Five Million Homes in the Next 10 Years

1. A message to my fellow immigrants, Observer, 20 May 2007
2. Communities and Local Government Statistical Release, House Building: January to March Quarter 2007, 17 May 2007
3. PricedOut, 13 May 2007
4. See James Heartfield, Let's Build: Why we need five million homes in the next ten years, chapter one, Audacity, 2006
5. Andrew Geddes, Immigrants get older, too, Foreign Policy Centre

Spiked

No BNP on the licence fee! - in Wales

• Pull the plug on the BNP Party Political Broadcast in Wales
• Emergency picket outside BBC Wales, 6pm-7pm, Tuesday 24th April
• Complain to broadcasters
Pickett 6-7pm Tuesday 24th April,
BBC Wales Offices,
Broadcasting House,
Llantrisant Rd
Llandaff,
CF5 2YQ

For more information contact Unite Against Fascism on:
07790 022 472 / 07734 032 314
supported by NUJ and BECTU


Please complain to the stations below:
BBC Wales (Broadcasting on BBC Wales 1 and 2 Tuesday 24 April)
08700 100 222 / Textphone: 08700 100 212
online complaint form:

ITV Wales (Broadcasting on Monday 23rd April):
02920 590590 /
Email: dutyoffice@itv.com

S4C (Broadcasting on Tuesday 24th April) :
0870 600 4141 / Textphone: 01766 514410 /
Email: hotline@s4c.co.uk


PULL THE PLUG ON THE BNP STATEMENT

The fascist British National Party (BNP) is fielding 20 candidates for all seats in the 5 regions for Welsh Assembly. It is scheduled to have a party political broadcast on ITV Wales on 23 April 2007 and on BBC Wales 1 and 2 and on S4C on 24 April 2007.

By standing this number of candidates the fascist BNP aims to gain access to public funds, free distribution of election materials and media broadcasts. Such a platform for the BNP will bring its politics of hatred into people's living rooms, encourage division and help them in their aim to legitimise their politics of hatred. Racist attacks increase in areas that the BNP have targeted. The BNP’s broadcast in Scotland featured anti-immigrant racism, in the week that an asylum seeker and her baby were victims of a vicious racist attack and sexual assault in Glasgow. The broadcast also included homophobic messages. We believe it is inappropriate, irresponsible and dangerous for broadcasters to allow the BNP, with its history of racist violence, a party political broadcast.

The BNP's politics "incite racial hatred", which is outlawed by the Public Order Act. The BNP should be barred from such free circulation of material because the right of everyone to live free from such incitement to hatred is fundamental and must be safeguarded.

There is no legal obligation on the television and radio companies to broadcast the views of any political party simply on the grounds it is fielding a certain number of candidates. See examples below of what happened previously; broadcasters can either choose not to show the election broadcast or demand changes to them if they are likely to break the Programme Code.

History shows that fascism threatens the democratic liberties of every person in this country, and particularly those whom the fascists choose to scapegoat: the black and Asian communities, Jewish people, Muslims, lesbian and gay people, those with disabilities, trade unionists, Roma people and many others. In 1999, the bombings in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho showed where the politics of racism and hatred can lead. We believe all broadcasting channels, particularly those that are publicly funded, have a responsibility to ensure views such as those of the BNP that can incite hatred should not be given uncritical coverage.

There are precedents to pulling the plug on the BNP:

- In 1997, parties needed to stand 50 candidates in the general election for a broadcast. The BNP stood 57 candidates. The broadcasters did not reach a unanimous view of the BNP broadcast and two versions were transmitted; in addition, the BNP was unable to make all the changes required by Channel 4 in the time available, so it was not transmitted by C4.

- In 2004, Channel 5 refused to show BNP film in the form supplied and finally showed a blanked out version of the broadcast. Some changes were also required to be made to the version shown in Scotland. Comprehensive editing was insisted on by S4C for the Welsh language version. The BNP's editing of their Party Election Broadcast for broadcast on S4C rendered most of it incomprehensible.

We invite all those who uphold the principles of equality and oppose the politics of race hate and fascism to call on:

• The BBC and independent television companies not to give uncritical air-time to the racist and fascist views of the British National Party in the course of the elections this year.

• The government to propose an amendment to the Representation of the People Act so that explicitly racist parties cannot have their election literature circulated free of charge.

• The government to strengthen Part 3 of the Public Order Act of 1986 so that prosecutions for incitement to racial hatred will be easier to bring and more likely to succeed.

UAF